Count Alan Rufus

Wednesday, 17 December 2014

According to page 20 of “The
History of Richmond, in the County of York”, by Christopher Clarkson, Esquire, F.S.A., printed
at Richmond by Thomas Bowman in 1821,Count Alan persuaded King William II to “assemble”, at York in 1089, England’s very first “High Court of Parliament” “under
that name”.

This pushes back the foundation and naming of Parliament 176 years before the official date, that of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester's, Parliament of 1265.

Tuesday, 16 December 2014

André Wilmart (1928) and Montague Rhodes James (1895) quote MSS. Bodl. 297, a manuscript copy of Marianus Scotus's
Chronicon on which a Bury monk has written a great many marginal notes,
one of which concerns the year AD 1093, commemorates the death of Count
Alan, then gives his epitaph, a seven line Latin poem in rhyming
couplets:

Wilmart thought that line 7 should precede line 1. In English, it then reads approximately as follows:

7 In life he was noble, of glittering
British stock,

1 A star [of wisdom] in the kingdom, Count
Alan's flesh now withers.

2 England is deeply troubled, for the
fairest of magnates has turned to ash.

3 Now the flower of the Kings of Brittany marks
the natural order of things.

4 He was a shining upholder [or teacher] of
the law, in whom ran the blood of kings,

5 A leader who thrived and reached the
highest ranks, his glory was second only to the King.

6 Weep for seeing this, and pray "May
he rest in peace, O God".

The specific term "cineratur" led me to wonder whether Alan died in a fire. A search revealed that London suffered one of its frequent major conflagrations in 1093. Since this was followed by a general scarcity of necessities, it seems reasonable to suppose that that year had a long, hot, dry summer that was harsh to crops and animals. Alan was interred by Abbot Baldwin, who had been Edward the Confessor's physician, in the cemetery outside the south door of the Church of the Abbey of Bury St Edmund and not long after reburied inside the church at the request of his family and the monks of St Mary's in York which Alan had founded. In the Church of St Edmund, Alan's death was commemorated each year on 4 August. This being at the height of the English summer, and it being known that Alan was often in London in his latter years, makes his death in that fire plausible - if only I knew the exact date of the conflagration.

Friday, 26 July 2013

Count Alan Rufus, or "A com" as the Domesday book calls him, was a youngster in the Armorican land of Brittany when Zoe Porphyrogenita reigned over the Byzantine Empire. Although lacking the distinction of being Greek, he was nonetheless a fascinating character, albeit mostly a quiet achiever.

A most interesting source of scholarly information about Alan and his times in England and neighbouring countries is:Domesday People: A Prosopography of Persons Occurring in English Documents 1066-1166, Volume I: Domesday Book, by K.S.B. Keats-Rohan; published January 21, 1999; ISBN-10: 085115722X; ISBN-13: 978-0851157221. Volume II of that work concerns Domesday Descendants. In 2011 Keats-Rohan followed up Volume I with an article that can be viewed online or downloaded as a PDF (if you have a Facebook account) from Academia dot Edu: